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Design Decisions to Die For

A couple of months ago I explored the subject of the best teapot in the world, and why it was a stainless steel version made for an ocean liner in the 1950s.

And I still wonder whether the strange Rampant Rabbit design of a Philippe Starck teapot tells us more about the man himself, or simply shows that somebody else pours his cuppa.

Yesterday I met the opposite end of the spectrum, in the form of the garden waste dustbin from my local council.

Unfortunately for the reader, that has set off an opposite train of thought about designs which deserve the death penalty.

And I am particularly exercised by tiny changes, the smallest of changes, which would have been trifles for the designer, but where there has simply not been any thought.

A Dusty reception for a Bin

A pair of wheelie bins, one for recyclings, one for garden waste, of the type which infest driveways from Penzance to Perth. These examples are in the Midlands.

Not ‘Bin Thinkin’

What’s missing?

The one on the right was designed, commissioned, purchased, and imposed by someone who has never had to open a gate while pulling a wheelie bin with one hand, has never had a weak (or amputated) arm, has never had to use a mobility aid while moving a bin, has never had to pull two bins at the same time, has never had to move a bin while carrying something else, and has perhaps never had a driveway more than 25 metres long.

Spot the difference?

A little bit of plastic is missing, to allow the bin to be pulled along in the middle of the handle.

The irony is that – to my eye – the design on the right looks a little more complicated (and expensive) to manufacture and more likely to break.

Safety Features behind the Danger

Imagine a fire on your cooker.

If you are in Clapham faux Ruritania let it be wholemeal toast which has caught fire on the Aga Tennis-Racket toaster. If you are in the North or in Salmond-land let it be a chip pan (or deep-fried Mars Bar) fire. And if you are in York let it be a petrol fire because somebody is decanting petrol in the kitchen with the cooker running.

In any case imagine the master off-switch for the cooker.

The one that you want to switch off when something dangerous happens.

Where do you suppose it likely to be placed until relatively recently?

Your wheelie-bin has another design flaw. It has a depression towards the rear of the lid which collects a small pond of rainwater.

On lifting the lid, this malevolent moisture immediately deposits itself into the bin, thus wetting all the contents, causing many of them to adhere to the sides and thus fail to empty whenever the bin-machine lifts it, in addition to causing the bin-wagon to carry an additional load of heavy water and wet material to its depot, thus increasing transport costs (and probably slaying a few polar bears too).

And yes, I’ve got one of that ‘design’ – cheap and nasty – the lid may appear more complex a moulding but that complexity is merely there to introduce some strength into the inferior material from which it is moulded. But I’m sure it was 10p a unit cheaper than the other type…..

Why did the designer of your preferred single handle design assume that the people who fell into your categories had smaller hands than the majority of the population who were able to use the outer handles? Otherwise the handle supports would have been equidistantly sited on the bin body. The new handle design is stronger and the breakage of a hinge pin requires the replacement of a smaller component. A hook handle like this could bridge the gap if needed. Or a similar device could be fabricated from a wire coathanger.

Don’t get me started on ‘designers’. I’ve had to try and rectify too many bad designs in the engineering world to think much of them.

For example, the time a new designer was employed – he had very good pieces of paper – to design a very expensive editing table for 35mm movie film and sound tape. He did reasonably well until someone pointed out that the unit was too big. He ‘fixed’ it by telling the CAD program to make it smaller. The drawings went off to the die makers – very expensive – and eventually the casting went to the machine shop. It was then I got called in – holes that should have been 99.8 mm diameter were in fact 80 mm and there just wasn’t enough metal to drill them out to the correct size. Yes, we did work out a way to salvage the very, very expensive machine but that ‘designer’ never worked for that company again.

Don’t get me started on engineers. Well those who design the UI to equipment.

One competitor to ours requires the user to have a manual to hand all the time because changing the settings means entering in coded register numbers and then editing a value. Ours in comparison is menu driven with a graphical interface and easy entry of data and doesn’t need much of a manual and not one for day to day use.

Ours might be slightly more expensive, not much, but is miles easier to use, especially bearing in mind sometimes our users are not very skilled at all.

Just lately I’ve been pondering that there is no such thing as traffic engineering in the UK, just a set of often contradicting rules that are blindly applied.

A couple of examples, one old and one a lot newer. Consider a long, one way street. What DON’T you want to happen? Vehicles going the wrong way of course. So we have a pair of ‘No Entry’ signs at the ‘exit’ end and that is the extent of the protection. Going the right way there can be a multidude of confirmation arrows but to what purpose? Fear that the right-hand lane might not be used? Have you used a signalled pedestrian crossing lately? The older ones had a ‘green man’ signal high up so that pedestrians crossing can see it and road vehicles can’t. Supposedly pedestrians just look straight ahead and ‘cross on green’ and get killed. So the new ones have a ‘green man’ low down at right-angles to the pedestrian flow. The result is that the pedestrians don’t know where to look and even if they do it is blocked by the person to your right. Meanwhile the people who can see it best of all are the approaching car drivers on the far side lane who get a distracting ‘green’ signal just when the should be seeing a ‘red’ one. I use one of these crossings twice a week and most people leap out across the road the moment they think the traffic is stopping. Unfortunately it is sited at a three-way junction and stopped crossing traffic can suddenly be replaced by turning traffic from the sideroad.

Ooooh! Editing tables! Anyone who has ever accessed the IWM’s archive film collection will know the pleasure of ‘driving’ the big Steenbeck desks in the Lambeth Road film annexe; the pleasures of ‘spooling up’, centring the rollers and then the accelerator lever to 3/4 speed – slow – stop – back and insert a fag paper in the film reel at the start and end of the bits you wanted transferred to Betacam … but that’s an aside.

The bane of my working life is architects who want to design their own bespoke version of a scheme component that’s otherwise readily available off the shelf; I even had one who wanted to design their own version of RW downpipe in a curious rectangular section. “No.” said I “Not unless you come up with hydrodynamic tests, flow rates, turbulence tests and full CE / BS certification all for the same cost as the proven square section stuff off the shelf. I’m not buying something untested and designed by someone who hasn’t a clue what they’re doing, and the developer’s money is going in securing a usable building, not some design experiment for your portfolio”. Cue variants of same lecture to the architects on just about every single job I’ve managed.

How many times do you hear: ‘have you seen my new bottle opener/coffeemaker/beanstringer; whatever?’….. Which when you try out said device, unsuccessfully, gets the inevitable: ‘no, no, you’re doing it wrong; there’s a knack to it’ But then; my H & G Simonds Ltd bottle opener, PT 466444, Rd 811274; one small forging, older than I am- still opens my beer perfectly.

As a mature student, I recently completed a degree course in the department of design in a northern university. There we were routinely exposed to the emperor’s new clothes bollocks of the likes of Starck (natch), Alessi (check out your local mega-expensive kitchen shop for examples of his tacky oeuvre), Bedine, and many others. But all ‘icons’, of course.

I do buy his stuff as presents for friends, who like it, though. So I once bought a [very expensive] Alessi metal breadbasket for their wedding. A few months later they came home after a nice long evening out, only to find their wonderful DIY renovated farmhouse turned into a heap of smoking ashes [electrical short-circuit – I’d told him that some things should be left to an electrician…]. Anyway, the ONLY thing that had survived the fire and only needed a bit of cleaning was … the Alessi breadbasket

I wish that the label ‘DESIGNER’ wasn’t used when referring to the ‘STYLISTS’ who were responsible for these. I am an electronic hardware and system design engineer and together with my software and meachanical design colleagues I DESIGN things. Sometimes I suffer from those STYLISTS who really should never be allowed away from their play-school coloured felt-tip pens. As SMBL says, the results of letting a stylist design a UI are normally lamentable.

About 80 years ago, some clever German invented the “Jerry Can”. It is still in used worldwide- with almost no changes. And one of the cleverest features is the design of the three handles. If you are strong enough to do so, you can carry the full 20kg by the centre one. If not, then two people lift it using the outer pair.